Can you spot my boobs? Meet the women baring their breasts on wallpaper – for charity

Hundreds of British women – including a Reverend, a local councillor and a
transgender – have had photos of their boobs taken to form part of an
elaborate wallpaper designed to raise money for a breast cancer charity. A
prudish (and brave) Katy Rink spills the beans on what it was like to
bare all.

Katy Rink: 'I suppose we could play 'find mum’s boobs', an edgier version of 'Where’s Wally'.'Photo: Boobwallpaper.com

By Katy Rink

2:08PM BST 12 Jun 2013

A very strange thing happened in my town of Shrewsbury last month. More than 250 women – including me – took their tops and bras off for a breast cancer charity wallpaper. And what an extraordinarily liberating experience it was.

Ordinarily, I am a bit of a prude; a bluestocking champion of the one-piece swimsuit and woolly tights. Stopping just short of the hijab, my sartorial choices tend to leave everything to the imagination, for very good reasons.

And yet, when the opportunity arose to bare my breasts for a libertine wallpaper art project, I scarcely hesitated before signing up; as did more hundreds of other women, almost without encouragement, according to the wallpaper designer, 38-year-old Sam Pooley.

Sam Pooley: The designer who got more than 250 women to strip half-naked for a charity project

What was the allure of stripping off? For me it was the thrill of anonymity, a new experience, helping a fun project get off the ground, the sheer hell of it; all those things.

For the other women it is many things; a naughty bit of fun or a confidence-boosting and liberating act of self-determination, depending on who you talk to.

All sorts of women came forward, including Rev Caroline Wright, aged 65, assistant priest at St George's Church in the tiny Shropshire village of Pontesbury.

A grandmother of 12, she said she had lost all notion of modesty concerning her own body. "The thought of exposing myself in a perfectly secure environment didn't bother me in the least," she said. "I looked around the room and saw all those women together, different ages, shapes and sizes and it was really powerful and great fun. It celebrates the beauty of real women, not in an idealised way."

Transgender Tessa Curtis, 54, from Worcester, was nervous, at first. "My boobs are 'in progress' as it were," she said. "I was worried the presence of a transgender person might cause offence but I was made to feel very welcome as part of the sisterhood."

It was quite surreal, having to line up to strip off in the basement of the Shrewsbury café, where Sam had set up her studio. The high decibel chatter compensated for nerves; we were all in this together.

"Ooh, lovely boobs!" Sam chirruped, as I pulled my T-shirt over my head, blushing like a virgin surrounded by men on a stag do. I was sure she said that to all the ladies queuing around the block to take part. Everyone was thoroughly enjoying themselves, giggling in nervous anticipation, patting one another on the back, offering words of encouragement, catching up on gossip. It was all brilliant fun and entirely unexpected.

There were ladies who had undergone breast reductions, enlargements and mastectomies, mothers with newborn babies, a local councillor and even a professional wet nurse.

One lady bought her boobs on the proceeds of a compensation payout, after a car accident in Thailand. Another volunteer wanted the photograph for posterity as she was booked in for a double mastectomy the following day.

Helen Nicell, 51, from Watford said her family had been "plagued" by cancer; she lost her mother and father to cancer and found a lump in her own breast on the day her mother died. Helen had a mastectomy in 2010, but a further growth was detected in her spine last year.

"Going to a topless photo-shoot with just one boob was quite out there," she said. "But then I saw ladies in their 70s and thought I would be OK. Breast cancer is something we are all very concerned about in our family. I discovered my own when I found my nipple had completely changed shape. Self-checking is so important."

The age range of participants spanned from a young woman of 19 to an 82-year-old grandmother who entitled her email to the charity “old boobies”. Most of the women live in Sam's home town of Shrewsbury, although she also had offers of help from across the UK, via herFacebook page.

Fine art

The bosoms have come together as a wallpaper collage of 1,000 tiny photographs, exhibited at Sam’s fine art degree show at Birmingham City University this week, together with books of comments from all the women involved with the project.

I wondered how Sam would impose order on those fleshy protuberances. Surely they resist conformity of any kind, beyond individual pairings? How would she find organisation of colour and symmetry in her raw material; boobs that were alternately flabby, drooping, misshapen, oversized, undersized, wombling free? Could she really herd those pendulous lovelies into some pleasing configuration? Would photo mosaic trickery be up to the challenge?

Against enormous odds – struggling with early pregnancy and then losing a baby at 16 weeks – Sam has pulled it off. The wallpaper is for sale on her website, but she is also looking for a high street retailer to take it on, so that we can all have boobs in our bathrooms, if we wish.

Sam said: "Of course this could be seen as girls getting their boobs out, but the other levels of the project blow that out of the water. It's a community project, about breast cancer prevention and education – a brilliant fun call to action, if you like – but it is also a celebration of boobs. I have met some extraordinary women from every demographic.

"I photographed one woman who battled anorexia for years but has recovered and just had her second baby. If I had asked her five years ago to take her top off, she would have cried. She put her arms in the air and just started giggling. How she feels about her boobs has changed dramatically.

"A lot of this project has been about laughter, about how people feel and where they get their strength from."

In the name of 'charidee'

A quarter of all profits from the sale of the wallpaper will go to the youth breast cancer charity Coppafeel, which sends "Boob Teams" out to festivals and gatherings of young people, to teach girls and young women how to examine themselves properly.

"This project all along has not been exclusive in any way. It's something I would like Betsy to be able to have in her downstairs loo if she wants it," Sam said.

Much as I would like Sam's wallpaper to take off, I am not sure I would choose to have hundreds of accusatory nipples jabbing at me as I enjoy my moment of peace in the cloistered sanctuary of my own WC.

Perhaps there will be a sexual dimension to sales; creepy bachelors with beds of obsidian silk and matching undergarments lying supine under a breasted ceiling. It might festoon the nation’s rakish nightspots; dressed up with a few gilt mirrors and whimsical drapery, inviting behaviours of a most disordered kind.

Other such projects have gone before, with some success. The risqué fruit wallpaper at the fashionable London Dean Street Townhouse, for example – "vulvas by Yeo" – an ode to the Soho neighbourhood’s brothel history.

But in our own homes? I suppose we could play “find mum’s t*ts”, an edgier version of “Where’s Wally”, or Richard Scarry’s hunt for goldbug. The boys would doubtless love it. Dad would definitely lose.

The wallpaper was intended as an unapologetic celebration of boobs; the apogee of female form. But in the coming together of volunteers, it has evolved into a statement of self-confidence and sisterhood. Sam said that by far the most common comment from any of the women was how much they like their breasts, over and above any other parts of their bodies.

Whatever's next? “Where’s Willy?” I don't think so. Men wouldn't have the guts.

The boobs wallpaper is available at www.boobwallpaper.com at £100 per roll. Sam is also selling signed and framed samples of the wallpaper at £50 each. Katy Rink is a freelance journalist.